Trash Talk: Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage To Speak At EPL

This team talks trash.

Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage (OLAUG) arrives in Chatham on Thursday, April 24, to speak at the Eldredge Public Library at 2 p.m. about their mission to rid the bottoms of Cape Cod’s ponds of the tires, rakes, golf balls, cans, fishing lures — even a wallet and a toilet — and other junk that has been dumped there.

They’ve got two Chatham ponds on their 22-dives schedule this summer: Goose Pond on June 15, and White’s Pond sometime in September. 

OLAUG actually got its start in Chatham, when founder Susan Baur, who lived in town at the time, “learned to love ponds.” She’s an avid swimmer, but “given the cold water, currents and sharks in that area, I traded in my salt water swimming for murk, weed[s], and snapping turtles,” she wrote in her children’s book “A Guide to the Best Ponds on Cape Cod.”

But as Baur grew to love the ponds and the creatures that live in them, she also grew to hate the trash that despoiled their environment. She began to talk with her friends, and sometime around 2017 a little community of women who love to swim began to gather with snorkels and garbage bags to clean pond bottoms here and there.

Now OLAUG numbers some 30 members. Their rules are few but strict. You have to be a woman. You have to be at least 64 (the oldest at present is about 85). And you have to pass their swim test.

Once you’re in, you get to choose which of the season’s dives you’d like to join. This year’s dives include an inaugural one on Martha’s Vineyard, where there’s some interest in starting a new chapter of OLAUG.

It takes a team to clean a pond bottom. Besides swimmers, OLAUG sends out canoes and kayaks to stay near the swimmers and receive the garbage. Once they get to shore, they pile it up for local people with dump stickers to take away.

And then there’s the “beach boss,” who stays on shore to watch people’s stuff, talk with curious onlookers about the organization and its work, and, very importantly, make sure that as many people come out of the water as went into it.

For their services, the Old Ladies ask local residents only for hot drinks (diving is chilly work) and some cookies. But what cookies, beach boss Daphne Burt reported. 

 “People have made cookies in the shape of the pond we’re cleaning, or in the shape of turtles,” or other creative designs.

(Although she lives in Mashpee, Burt’s other volunteer work brings her close to The Chronicle’s territory. She reads this newspaper for the Audible Local Ledger, a service for people with visual impairments.)

Burt, who’s been with the group for about a year, remembers the capture of the toilet from John’s Pond in Mashpee. “It took a lot of planning to pull it up and to get it into the boat because of how heavy it was,” she recalled. Also, she added, “There was an eel living in it.”

Marci Johnson of Harwich is another “Old Lady.” For her, finding out about OLAUG came along just as she had picked up an old love of swimming as a way to recover from surgery and bereavement. 

 “Now that’s a group,” she remembered thinking to herself as she read about OLAUG. “That’s something I want to do. And when I joined, I laughed again for the first time in a long time.” She saluted Susan Baur as “a total inspiration for all of us.”

Burt agreed. She too joined OLAUG about a year ago because of Baur, and explained why.

 “I liked Susan’s attitude of hard work, important work. I liked that she set a minimum age limit [at 64]. I liked that she says, ‘There’s nothing that three women can’t do together.’”

When some of the group appeared on Drew Barrymore’s show for a presentation about OLAUG, they so impressed their host that she gave them twice the honorarium she had promised them for the continuation of their work.

From her perspective as an OLAUG beach boss, Daphne Burt has seen a lot of stuff come out of Cape Cod’s ponds. But, she said, by far “the coolest thing to come out of the water is the divers. They’re cold but happy.”

The representatives of OLAUG who speak at the library on April 24 will share stories, pictures and no doubt display some of their garbage. They’re planning another presentation later this spring at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster.

Their website is OLAUG.MA@gmail.com. Information on this and other programs at the library is available at eldredgelibrary.org/programs.